Opera has started the global rollout of built-in feature to block the advertisements on websites. The advertisements are universally filtered from the websites on server level while applying Opera’s data compression tech to save the data used on the consumers’ end. The app is now available on iOS, Android phones and Windows phones. It offers native advertisement blocking in the Opera Mini app for Android and Opera browsers for computers.

“Users are demanding ad blockers because of the better browsing experience it offers,” says Nuno Sitima, SVP Mobile Browsers, Opera. “Opera users can speed up their mobile surfing, skip extra data charges and stretch their internet packages even further by blocking in the browser intrusive and data-wasting ads and heavy tracking.”

According to benchmarks, Opera browser turned out to be faster than Google Chrome and other browsers while the Adblock browser lags by 79% in terms of browsing. While the average size of a webpage after removing advertisements is 229 KB. Chrome lagged behind by keeping the size of the page about 84% more with 422 KB and Adblock Browser burned 3.4 times the size by making the size of the page as 784 KB.

According to a research conducted by PageFair, approximately 90% of all the people on the mobile web were blocking ads, which translated into 419 million people in terms of numbers which was double the number of people blocking the advertisements on desktops.

Opera emphasised the need for progressive web apps, websites that run like mobile apps but inside the mobile web browser, pushing notifications and updates like a normal web app for a significant reduction in data and storage usage.